The Seat of Woman's Delight

...Yet she wants to have it all, so at the same time that she champions female desire, she calls for "rules that make sense," a "coherent new sexual ethic...

...Now she gives a course at the University of California at Santa Cruz called "The Politics of Sexual Representation" and tours colleges around the country lecturing on pornography, safe sex and other hot-button issues...

...Sex manuals instructed men on foreplay and on how to give their mates multiple orgasms...

...Usually she is at her best when talking about herself, no doubt because she values experience over ideas...

...She believes there is no necessary contradiction between appeals for liberation and for limits, and maybe there isn't...

...We can still take responsibility for our actions no matter how outr?© or extreme our imaginings...

...if obvious...

...I wish she had been more explicit than she is...

...to prove the contingency of Western sexual practices...

...Nonetheless, you frequently get the feeling that in her determination to set us all free, she is unwilling to acknowledge how dreadfully complicated the whole business of sexuality can be...

...Fathers sold daughters into slavery or prostitution, and the poor were known to engage in female infanticide (a practice that has been said to continue down to the present day...

...Some are autobiographical, others deal with such familiar topics as AIDS and gay marriage...

...But she doesn't worry, as Wolf does, about sexual relations beginning too soon...

...But the main difference is that Bright writes with a light touch, a kind of pagan exuberance...

...Nothing on earth is held so cheap...

...Thus, she urges variety and experimentation, and she tells us not to be afraid of our fantasies, no matter how grotesque...

...Contrary to what she claims, women of that society were not valued...

...Wolf likes the Chinese erotic poetry she has read, and because she has a thesis to push she doesn't feel it is necessary to bother with anything else...

...I've always been touched when someone writes me a letter telling me how my work has influenced them...

...It put a whole different light on his problems with women...

...and from the responses she concludes that the students are surprisingly grown-up, certainly compared to how they are portrayed in the media...

...They had almost no property rights, or any right to divorce, though a husband could divorce his wife if she failed to produce a male heir...

...When it was all over, Bright was distinctly underwhelmed: "It didn't seem like the heart of darkness to me...

...Her first lover was a sensitive, caring guy...

...Some of her friends had far more gruesome experiences...

...It's not that one disagrees with her...

...Or course, she could respond that foot-binding arose about a thousand years after the period she is discussing (and then lasted for about anotherthousand), but surely she owes it to her readers to explain how the Chinese went from adoration to disfigurement, and what the implications of that history are...

...or, as Wolf puts it, "to redeem the slut in me...

...Yet she is hopelessly vague about what those answers should be...

...The questions that my audience posed were exactly the same ones that people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s also ask...

...Let consensuality and dignity be our guide to what's right and wrong...

...It was taken to be a force that, properly directed, would bestow health and well-being on men as well as women...

...Eager to show that other times and places have treated relations between men and women differently than our own, she draws on a great array of scholarship from all the disciplines...

...I had a similar reaction while reading Naomi Wolf's latest book, Promiscuities...

...To encourage openness she distributes questionnaires...

...So she had her girlfriend tie her to the bed, and she instructed her to "use her imagination...

...Her own recommendation is for a type of middle way, what she terms "sexual gradualism...

...they both have young daughters...

...In striking contrast to Wolf, she says: "I read an editorial by critic Anne Roiphe last year in which she wrote that teenagers have sex for all sorts of sad rebellious reasons...

...Who on this side of Pat Robertson would deny the joy and value of female desire...

...Rape was considered harmful to the aggressor as well as to the victim...

...It is important to teach girls about the consequences and dangers of sexual intercourse," she says...

...Culture for her is not a web of interconnections, a totality, it's a kind of smorgasbord, allowing her to choose a bit of Taoist sex instruction from this bowl and some chopped liver from that one...

...He was so inept at cunnilingus, I couldn't believe he wasn't coached...

...Three of the most interesting pieces in her book deal with what she has learned on the campus circuit...

...The most common practical question asked by the boys was how to perform cunnilingus, which Bright takes as a sign that they are genuinely interested in learning how to please their lovers...

...A woman's genitals were portrayed in poetry as "the open peony blossom," "the golden lotus," "the receptive vase," "the golden cleft...

...Predictably, when she lost her virginity at age 15, her reaction was "that's it...

...Perhaps all this is too upbeat, too sanguine...

...Similarly, the moment when the girls are "really ready" for the Big Step seems to arrive, Wolf primly suggests, with "their 18th birthday or their engagement or their marriage...

...And then, with a longing that makes you want to look away, she sighs: "To appreciate women so much...

...In the Han Dynasty, around the time of Christ, Wolf explains, "female desire was not treated with fear nor with contempt and ridicule...

...And she was lucky...

...She points out that a Venetian scientist identified this "seat of woman's delight" as early as 1559, but over the years there occurred what she calls "the great forgetting," until our own era when the various advocates of open and honest sexual relations...

...she and her teenage friends were made to feel "that we were not alive if we were not being sexual...

...Here she is on the porn film John Bobbitt made after his famous incident: "We find out the salient facts such as, yes, his penis seems to function...

...She has been a sex advice columnist and a founder of the lesbian journal On Our Backs...

...Her book is full of ugly stories of joyless, compulsive couplings, date rapes and predatory males (many of them her friends...

...This, after all, is part of what the '60s were all about...

...Worse, she starts talking about women as sorceresses, priestesses and goddesses, with a need to be worshiped and adored...

...from Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger and Theodore van de Velde to Shere Hite and the authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves...

...What I couldn't believe was that she left out the other half...

...And yet, if it should ever come down to a choice between the somber and sentimental Naomi Wolf and the joyous and ribald Susie Bright, I know which one I would want to see teaching sex to our nation's teens and pre-teens...

...Nowhere does Wolf mention this...

...By "what to try instead" she doesn't mean volleyball and cold showers, but "other kinds of sexual exploration that help them wait for intercourse until they are really ready...

...We all have our sexual preferences, she explains, and she calls for a release of inhibitions so that we can discover what those preferences are...

...Anyone who is looking for a genuine celebration of sexuality is advised to turn instead to Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union...

...In its effort to celebrate female sexuality...

...Her argument turns on the sort of sexual education we are going to offer girls...

...For a book that is supposed to be celebrating sexuality, Promiscuities is remarkably grim...

...As young girls they were separated from boys, secluded, and taught to be timid and submissive, never to raise their voices...

...Bright, unlike Wolf, is bisexual, with an apparent preference for women...

...For those who may be shocked at the idea of letting their thoughts run wild, she offers consoling...

...The crucial thing for her, one surmises, is that the kids be ready to appreciate sex when they decide to have it...

...advice: Thinking something is not the same as doing it...

...have had to assert and reassert that the clitoris has a vital role to play in female (not to mention male) sexuality...

...Things could be other than they are...

...Such findings lead Bright into Naomi Wolf territory, meditating on what we should be teaching youngsters about sex...

...This episode is typical of what Bright is up to...

...metaphors of beauty, sweetness, artistry, rareness, and fragrance," Wolf writes...

...And even if Wolf sometimes seems to be pounding away at so many open doors, she can be provocatively instructive, as in her thumbnail, hide-and-seek history of the clitoris...

...She thinks it is all right for young ladies to be instructed in "petting" (whatever that means...

...Just when you want Wolf to get down to specifics, she drifts off into one of those overblown reveries that make this book so annoying, rhapsodizing about how "female sexuality participates in the divine image," how it is something "sacred" and (one of her favorite words) "magical...

...Wolf seems to be angry at a lot of people...

...As Wolf tells it, everything came too fast and too easy for her generation...

...It's clear that everything came too fast for her...

...No, she insists, an end to repression will not produce a nation of sex maniacs, because "as threatened as everyone seems to be by excess, our natural discriminations really do kick in at some point...

...it was more like falling down the stairs...

...There are differences, too: Bright was raised Catholic, Wolf Jewish...

...Lovemaking was an act of harmony "In this sort of atmosphere," Wolf says, "a woman would have no need to 'fake it.'" Even the language of ancient China displayed a respect, indeed a reverence, for female desire...

...They require deft handling, and Wolf is not up to the job...

...The only way to find out, she decided, was to try it herself...

...Now, what is wrong with this picture...

...No one, however, writes as directly about sex as Bright, and when she is on she conveys an aura not only of honesty but of exhilaration...

...However, he cannot give head to save his life...

...Wolf grew up after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, so that the rights the first generation of modern feminists had to fight for were a given for her...

...Where Wolf is pretentious, she is plainspoken, aphoristic and, most important, particularly when the subject is sex, amusing...

...Was there really something so bad about S/M, some darker force...

...But what about, say, fellatio...

...To appreciate women so much...

...Bright is fully aware of the dark side of sex...

...So we are barraged with observations about Zuni Indians and 5th-century Alexandrians and the Uapas of the Amazon rain forest and, most notably, the ancient Chinese, who get several pages all to themselves...

...A few are too preachy or simplistic, and another one or two seem padded to fill out an otherwise slender volume...

...Or lesbianism...

...The bookis a collection of short pieces...

...Reviewed by Barry Gewen Preview editor, New York "Times Book Review" Not long ago I read an article on South Africa that was so smug and sanctimonious, so pleased to bask in the warmth of its own progressivism, that it made me want to come out in favor of apartheid...

...Like Wolf, she is in favor of honesty and frankness, answering every question, and like Wolf, too, she wants to purvey a positive image of sexuality to counter all the negative images that are out there...

...Boys are another matter...

...Clearly, Wolf observes, there is something in our culture that makes us uncomfortable with this essential piece of human anatomy...

...Bright observes: "It seemed like half the women in the crowd were orgasmically frustrated one way or another...

...But obviously these are horses that tend to pull in opposite directions...

...251 pp...

...they have both worked with abused women...

...they need mentorship on every level...

...anthropology, history, theology, etc...

...Bright and Wolf share many qualities: They are both from the West Coast (Bright now lives in the hedonistic San Francisco...

...Yikes...

...As a result, she can repeat and repeat with mindless approbation that many cultures outside the West have viewed women as far more carnal than men, without ever reflecting on the fact that those same cultures have often kept their very carnal women hidden away under lock and key...

...That's when you are likely to wish that she had had stricter parents, or a first night that had gone better than hers did...

...Moreover, a few minutes in the library will reveal that Wolf is not telling the whole story about China, not even half the story...

...her parents, large numbers of men, society in general...

...To the consternation of the more "buttoned-down" gays, the ecumenical Bright spoke up in favor of "all the kinds of sexual love and life," crossdressing, bondage, sadism and masochism...

...The girls wanted to know how to reach orgasm, or how to reach it more easily...

...She is also right that the liberal concentration on teaching sexual mechanics and distributing condoms in the schools, to the exclusion of moral content, is part of the problem, not part of the solution...

...An old Chinese proverb declared that the most beautiful and gifted girl was less desirable than a deformed boy, and one ancient poet wrote: "How sad it is to be a woman...

...But when I got back from the conference," she says, "I felt a little queasy...

...But not in the absence of positive information about what to try instead...

...it is so self-important and inflated, so sentimental to the point of ickiness, that I found myself thinking purdah might not be such a bad idea for women (or at least for Naomi Wolf...

...The city, she says, "conspired to turn you into a hedonist...

...the ecstasy and happiness of first sexual adventures, the intense comfort and familiarity that comes with finding your first lover, the first person you get to know intimately...

...She claims that in college the girls she knew were expected to sleep with between 10 and 30 boys...

...Few of Wolf's readers are likely to know much about the history and culture of China, yet if there is one thing they will certainly know, it is that, amid all this appreciation of women, the Chinese practiced the custom of foot-binding, crippling girls for life in the pursuit of a misguided ideal of beauty...

...Bright has a tattoo and pierced labia (I'm assuming Wolf has neither of these though she doesn't actually say...

...It was regarded as a powerful elemental force...

...One might have thought this was a lesson that had been digested at least since the time of Franz Boas, if not that of Herder, but Wolf goes through the exercise all over again because she is determined to demonstrate that Western women get a raw deal, that other cultures have placed far greater value on female sexuality...

...Each time the announcement is made, it comes as a fresh discovery, a liberating revelation...

...something quick, dirty, and anonymous...

...What turns you on may not match your artistic values, your romantic choices in real life, your political views, but it is just as much a part of you, just as real and substantial as any other aspect...

...especially for her, since she was raised in San Francisco, not far from Haight-Ashbury, the daughter of liberal, indulgent parents...

...This is an important point because it speaks to an unresolved conflict at the heart of Promiscuities, a kind of excluded middle...

...Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union By Susie Bright Simon & Schuster...

...Wolf calls for female retreats, in which older, more experienced women would answer "every single question the girls want to ask...

...It's not a defect or a weakness...

...Wolf is right that the conservative demand for a conspiracy of silence combined with the message "just say no" is irrelevant and ineffectual...

...The freedom that the adults had won, she says, turned into a "moral chaos" for the kids...

...Bright is a woman with a mission, and a natural teacher...

...Girls, especially, have to be taught sexual selfconfidence...

...She tells, for example, of a gay political convention in the early '80s, where the delegates divided on whether or not to defend "sexual preferences that go beyond vanilla homosexuality...

...Itdrove me berserk...

...She gives no reason why she thinks these sexually aware young women will choose to wait that long...

...It's as if we keep misplacing the damn thing...

...If she has a religion, it is a faith in the ultimate benignity of human sexuality...

...they were devalued, peony blossoms and all...

...Out came a belt, then threats with a lighted cigarette and a few flicked ashes...

...But if Wolf's research serves her well here, more often it weighs her book down with the burden of half-digested erudition, the gleanings of the autodidact...

...My parents tmstedme...